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December 28, 2006

John Edwards, the net and the renewal of a democratic Left in America

Today, former Senator John Edwards announced his candidacy for the Presidency in the 2008 elections. And, you may be asking yourself, why would this even remotely concern me?

After all, practically everything on this website is about two subjects – the labour movement and the Internet, and where they intersect.

So that's what I want to talk about – how the Edwards campaign may turn out to be one of the great experiments, answering two questions which have preoccupied me for several years:

1) Can the Internet play a real role in promoting social change?

2) Does the trade union movement have a future?

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Let's start with how Edwards is using the net.

He has already been described by journalists as being the Presidential candidate who has made the most serious commitment to using the net. A quick glance at his website shows why. The site includes everything that could be on every activists' list of what a great campaigning website needs. Every buzzword of what's being called “Web 2.0” has been checked off, including YouTube videos, podcasts, blogs, community sites MySpace and Facebook, a Flickr photo gallery, dozens of RSS news feeds, etc.

I wish unions would make half the investment into a great website as Edwards has done.

And the site is truly interactive. It allows supporters to post not only comments on what Edwards is saying, but their own blog entries. I tested it a few months ago, back when it was the pre-campaign “One America Committee” and posted an announcement about LabourStart's campaign in support of Miami janitors then on hunger strike. (Edwards had put in an appearance on their picket line.) The entry appeared, and we were able to build some more support for the campaign.

One criticism of the site might be that it's too packed with stuff, that someone really did have a checklist of buzzwords and included them all, but I won't go into that here.

The point is that Edwards is trying to use everything that's available, testing to see what works, and that is exactly what unions should be doing as well.

Second, I said that a running thread in everything I have written for some years now is the question of whether the trade union movement has a future or not. You might be asking yourself what this has to do with the Edwards campaign. The answer is: plenty.

Edwards did not come out of the trade union movement; he made his millions (and they were millions) as a lawyer. He may have had working-class roots, but they appear to be behind him now. And yet in recent years, especially since his defeat in the 2004 elections (when he first ran for the Democratic nomination, and then as John Kerry's vice presidential candidate), he has made a sharp turn toward the unions.

This has been in evidence for some time now, and a quick glance at his activities over the last year or so show that he's been in the thick of the fight against poverty, and helped get several states to enact higher minimum wages than the stingy Republican administration in Washington.

This is great stuff, and combined with his constant appearances at union events and expressions of support for union causes, he did two things this week that cement the bond between John Edwards and the trade union movement.

First, in his two-minute online video, placed on YouTube (where else?), standing in front of a ruined New Orleans house, he spoke about all the great work that's been done – this was at the very end – to organize workers into unions. It was a brief reference, but it was a clear mention of Edwards' strong belief in the positive role of trade unions.

And it gets better. Today, the campaign named its manager, the man who is leading the effort to get Edwards into the White House. That man is David Bonior, a name I've certainly come across as he's also the Chair of a group called American Rights at Work -- an organization that's been around since 2003 promoting its vision of the US as “a nation where the freedom of workers to organize unions and bargain collectively with employers is guaranteed and promoted.”

If this stuff sounds mild to Europeans and others, it sounds positively radical to Americans. The percentage of American workers organized into unions has been plummeting for decades, and is below 10% in the private sector.

Studies have shown that a majority of workers in the US would join unions if they could, but they don't because of a well-grounded fear that they could lose their jobs if they do.

Every day, people get sacked by their employers for trying to join unions. There has long been a corporate reign of terror in the workplace and ever since I've been politically active (this goes back some time) unions have called for changes to the country's laws to make it easier to join unions.

So now we have a presidential campaign boosting a candidate who is the most pro-labour politician in America today, run by a labour studies professor (I'm not making this up) who until yesterday was running a workers' rights organization. This is the kind of politics we haven't seen in America for more than a generation.

It bears comparison to the nearly successful 1934 California gubernatorial campaign by Upton Sinclair, a socialist running as a Democrat, under the slogan “End Poverty in California”. It reminds one of the campaigns of the Socialist Party in its heyday, when Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas could get close to a million votes.

And on a personal level, I'm reminded of a Presidential campaign that was discussed, and then abandoned, by Michael Harrington back in 1978-9. Harrington proposed then to launch is campaign from the ruins of the South Bronx – something echoed by Edwards' decision today to launch his own campaign from still-devastated New Orleans.

None of this means that Edwards is a socialist – far from it. But I mention this to point out that there is a radical tradition in American politics, closely linked to the unions (Debs, of course, was a great railway union leader before becoming a politician). Edwards may well fit into this tradition.

The problem with that tradition is that it never came close to winning the Presidency. That may be about to change.

Today, polls in the state of Iowa, the first battleground state in the long series of Democratic Party primaries and caucuses, show Edwards in the lead – ahead of Hillary Clinton and all the others.

Edwards is running on an explicitly pro-union message, unashamed of his connections to the labour movement in his country. And he's doing so with the kind of website that every union and campaigning organization should aspire to have.

That's why his campaign interests me so much, and why I intend to do what I can to learn about it, report on it, and participate in it.

December 21, 2006

Unions and the web – What's changed in the last seven years?

The short answer is – everything and nothing.

Let's start with the "everything" part. Back in the twentieth century, unions were reluctant to embrace the net. The majority of union members were not yet online, and the top leadership of many unions was not convinced that the Internet was something unions needed to get involved with.

Fast forward to 2006 and basically every union worth its salt has got a website. Email has become a part of the daily life of nearly every trade union official, at least in the developed countries.

For those of us who've been at this for a while, including the editor of this online journal and myself, it is certainly something of a personal triumph every time we hear a union leader speak about how important this new technology is. Some of us had been saying that for many years before anyone listened.

So as we look back at how far unions have come, how ubiquitous the new technology has become, one is tempted to ponder early retirement and rest on one's proverbial laurels. And yet ...

Now we come to the "nothing" part.

If one is in a despondent mood, you can almost build the case that nothing has really changed much in the last few years, in spite of all those new websites and inboxes filling up with spam (and the occasional message).

For many unions, the web became simply another means of communication, an electronic version of existing tools such as newsletters and press releases. For those unions, the website is simply a repository of documents that existed in one form or another long before there ever was a web.

Even when unions have boldly set out to use really, really new technologies - such as online video - they are often not really very different from videos unions might have produced in the past.

For most unions, the web is seen as a means of one-to-many communication, a way for the union to talk to its members (and perhaps a wider audience). And that's it.

But of course, the web is much more than that - something that pundits today are calling "Web 2.0" but many of us understood many years ago to be central to how it works.

Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who came up with the idea of the web some 15 years ago, often pointed out that in his original version of a web browser, if you could read a document, you could also edit it.

This idea has been realized in part by the many websites which thrive on the input of users - websites which would not exist but for the active participation of their readers. Think, for example, of the extraordinary Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that works exactly according to Berners-Lee's vision. By mobilizing the collective intelligence and experience of millions of people, the Wikipedia has become the Library of Alexandria of our time.

Other enormously popular websites today - MySpace, Flickr, YouTube and many more - are entirely comprised of documents, photos, and videos posted by visitors. They are practically empty buildings when they start, but they are rapidly filled up with content, much of which is useless but some of which is amazing.

The real power of the trade union movement, as we know (or used to know) lies in its membership. The collective intelligence and experience of our millions of members is what makes unions possible - but this is hardly recognized at all in our union websites.

Of course there are exceptions. In Britain, the Trades Union Congress maintains a website for thousands of union reps which is almost entirely an online - and very active - discussion forum. It works so well that a number of academics have made it their job to study why it works. But it is not being widely emulated.

LabourStart has tried to move in the direction of greater involvement and openness, and what was a one-man show back in 1999 is today a website maintained by nearly 500 volunteers. Tens of thousands participate in its online campaigns, which did not even exist back in 1999.

Where unions have opened up their websites, and tried to maximize member involvement, they have not nearly been ambitious enough. It is not enough, in my view, to use the web to strengthen the local union in a particular factory, or town. Nor is it enough to use the web to attempt to strengthen our national unions.

The real power of the web, something recognized by many of the early users in the labour movement, is the fact that the net has no borders.

When security guards in Indonesia, illegally sacked by the multinational corporation that employed them, seize control of the company headquarters in Jakarta, that is no longer a matter for their own union, or Indonesian workers alone. It is a concern for all of us, which is why such an event can now trigger an instant, large-scale global campaign.

The arrest of the leader of the Tehran bus workers, a union which managed to completely shut down the Iranian capital in a series of strikes early in 2006, now prompts reactions within hours across the globe.

And when Australian workers pour out into the streets to protest against one of the most anti-union governments in the world, their story is told and their message is heard everywhere - in real time.

Of course the Internet is a great tool for the local trade union to announce its annual picnic, and for a national union to try to sign up new members online. Those are things we used to use print newsletters for, or leaflets at factory gates. There is nothing new in creating an online newsletter.

But what we are doing when we use the net to build international solidarity is something that we have never been able to do before, or at least not on this scale, and not at this speed.

This is the real power of the net, and this is what is really new and different about it. The net offers us the promise of the creation of a new kind of trade union, a union which knows no borders, a union in which an injury to one is an injury to all - anywhere in the world.

Only such a trade union movement will survive globalization. If we do not move in that direction, unions will become extinct.

Since 1999 we have taken tiny baby-steps in the direction of the creation of such a new labour movement using the net, but we have not moved far enough and we have not moved fast enough.

We could have done much more - and we can still do much more.

Workers Online was a triumph, a brilliant use of the net that inspired many and should serve as a model to unions everywhere. It will be missed.

December 11, 2006

Building support for Migrant Workers

I'm attending a conference today organized by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) here in London. There seems to be some kind of wireless Internet connection, so if I can, I will blog throughout the day as the conference goes along.

13:15 That's it -- lunch break. I'm done here for the day ...

13:02 Bridget Anderson from Kalayaan has begun speaking. Kalayaan supports self-organized groups of migrant domestic workers (in private households), and has been at this since 1987, and works closely with the T&G union.

12:44 Robert Szewczyk from NSZZ Solidarnosc has begun to speak. He points out that this is the greatest economic migration in Polish history, especially since the Polish accession to the EU. Officially, 700,000 Poles have migrated looking for better paid work -- perhaps more. There have been some claims that as many as 2 million Poles have migrated but this is certainly not the case.

Polish unemployment has fallen by 3%, around 15.3%, now below 15% -- due to the 700,000 who have left the country.

A typical migrant is young -- under 30 years old. They will have a modest command of English. Few intend to stay very long abroad. They came here for cash, to tell the truth.

Of EU countries, only Ireland, the UK and Sweden opened their labour markets instantly to the Poles -- they and the 10 new members. In 2006, other countries opened up their labour markets as well, including non-EU states such as Norway. Other EU countries, such as Germany, maintain transition periods.

This wave of migration consists almost entirely of workers who fill a gap in the economy; very few become outcasts or homeless. Those countries which accepted migrant workers have seen their economies grow quickly. The main areas of employment include construction, agriculture, transport, health care, hotels, trade, and food processing. A classic brain drain is taking place in Poland.

There are many cases of abuse of Polish workers in western Europe -- labour camps run by organized crime in Italy; non payment of wages in Spain; unequal treatment at an EDF plant and the same in Sweden. Further abuses included withholding of passports, lower than minimum wage paid, poor health and safety conditions, and deductions of living costs from wages.

Why don't they join unions? (Slide went by too fast ... not getting all of us ...) He is listing 8 or 9 reasons. Unions haven't approached workers. Workers don't know their rights. They fear being sacked. They think unions represent only indigenous workers.

Conferences such as this are quite common, but this is the first one in the UK he has attended. This is not the action itself, which we need. Gave examples of successful, concrete projects -- GMB employed Polish and Lithuanian full time organizers, Usdaw did a brochure in Polish, SIPTU in Ireland appointed Polish organizers -- this was more important than the agreement signed between Solidarnosc and the union.

Further expansion of the EU (Bulgaria and Romania) will make things more complex and difficult.

12:30 Frances O'Grady, TUC deputy general secretary, is now speaking in the plenary. No need to summarize this here, because it's already been posted to the web (see below).

12:25 Workshop summary:

The room was packed - about 30 people in my workshop, which was one of four taking place simulatenously. But unfortunately, there was no connection to a wireless network. I am the only person in the room using a laptop.

Participants introduced themselves -- several in halting English, representatives of several migrant workers' communities, and trade unionists.

Discussion focussed on what people were actually doing -- from all over the UK.

One spoke about a project in Canary Wharf, London which has led to some migrant workers becoming union reps (shop stewards) and even learning reps.

The head of the GLA suggested that people make use of their publications in all major European languages telling workers their rights. He also pointed out that workers who were being exploited could call up Crime Stoppers, where an interpreter would be made available -- and could report violations anonymously. Right now, they only focus on agriculture and food processing, but the role might be expanded. Later he explained that agencies (gangmasters) are actually quite vulnerable -- they can lose their licenses, or if they have no license, they can be locked up. But he emphasized that workers need not put themselves at risk, and should be able to report violations anonymously.

A T&G member spoke about organizing Polish workers -- many of whom come over with no trade union background. The union has brought over representatives of NSZZ Solidarnosc (do that not know that there is more than one national trade union center in Poland?)

From Plymouth, we heard about a European Social Fund project originally designed to aid refugees, but now devoting 2/3 of its time to migrant workers -- working closely with the TUC and the Citizens Advice Bureau. She later explained that there are very few resources for migrant workers, and far more resources for refugees.

It was reported that in January, the government is due to send out a leaflet to 500,000 employers explaining to them the issues around regularizing foreign workers. Employers will be urged to call up a dedicated phone line to report workers that may not be properly documented.

A PCS official spoke about the problem of enforcing such things as minimum wage when the number of civil servants is being cut, and urged people to support a January 20th demonstration against those cuts.

A person from a CAB in the Scottish Highlands spoke about the lack of unions in her area, and the role played by groups like the CAB filling their role. She emphasized that the issue is not only low pay, but long hours.

From Cumbria a woman spoke about a drop-in center for migrant workers -- a center specifically designed to remove barriers, and to offer individual advice.

The possibility of a day of action in support of migrant workers was suggested, mentioning the success of the May 1 day of action in the USA last year which drew three million people into the streets.

Speakers spoke about different ways of using media to reach out to migrant workers -- including newspapers in their language, local radio stations, and even comic books.

A women from a Polish center in Southhampton spoke about the dozens of workers who come in every day with questions, facing language problems. They have organized classes for adults and for children, and even football teams for Polish migrant workers.

11:05 Now we move over to workshops ...

11:02 His current slide talks about discussion forums, wikis and blogs. (Wikis and blogs?!?) This apparently part of their training. Talks about the need for 'lateral thinking'.

11:01 Ian Moss from the Citizens Advice Bureau, begins speaking. He shows how his organization uses machine translation (MT) - Babelfish - to help migrant workers. He shows examples of leaflets from local CABs in different languages. He is, unfortunately, speaking in a monotone, showing slides full of text, and talking to the screen rather than the audience, so we're not hearing everything he's saying. He's showing a slide now which he thinks is Polish, but from the audience, people call out that it's in Russian. (I can't read the slide myself from here.)

10:50 Robson speaks about migrant workers using the net -- library access. Recommends the website http://www.migrantworkers.co.uk

10:43 Robson speaks about the problems facing migrant workers -- and highlights translation and interpretation as central.

10:38 Reverend Canon Alan Robson, from Integration Lincolshire, speaks.

10:35 Dromey emphasizes the role of churches, mosques and synagogues in those coalitions. Migrant workers have many issues outside the world of work, such as housing. Employers must stop exploiting vulnerable migrant workers. Responsibility falls on employers, clients and government. The government must change its tone on migration. We must not bracket migration with crime and security. As for government's responsibility -- calls for organization, regulation and regularization (noting that this is not exactly a catchy phrase). It is impractical and immoral to deport hundreds of thousands of workers. Calls for an amnesty for 500,000 of them. Ends.

10:30 Dromey continues. We have to move beyond simply passing resolutions. What do we do in practical terms? The T&G has included this in their organizing agenda - starting with organizing cleaners here in London. At campaign start, cleaners were paid minimum wage. An army of cleaners is now on the march. Two historic agreements have been signed in the last two weeks, covering thousands of workers, recognizing the T&G and moving towards the living wage. This morning, he saw hundreds more protestors moving out. A second example is in the meat industry, particularly poulty. In 2007, we will see the end of the two-tier labour market in this industry. Third example: migrant workers, strawberry pickers at S&A, previously forced to sleep in the woods, paying to call for ambulances, paid almost nothing. T&G began picketing supermarkets, and got results. The biggest breakthrough for organizing agricultural workers in a generation. T&G now has 70 organizers -- one third of them from ethnic minority backgrounds, one third are women. Building coalitions of support is crucial.

10:20 Dromey says that in one sense, nothing is new. His father came here in the 1930s from Ireland, and was embraced by the trade union movement. But what we now see is very different. The scale of migration is greater than ever before. How do we respond to that? Notes that many of the migrant workers today are overqualified, which explains some of their anger at being treated like serfs. Mentions the T&G's Justice for Cleaners campaign.

10:14 Tudor says that the issue is how do we support migrant workers, and notes that many of those present are from community organizations and not only trade unions. He finishes quickly and introduces Jack Dromey of the T&G -- who he calls an 'iconic' figure in the British trade union movement.

10:11 OK, now we begin. Owen Tudor is speaking.

10:07 While we're waiting, you can already read what one of the speakers is going to say.

10:00 Conference start is being delayed. The London Underground, amazingly, is running late and many people have yet to arrive, apparently. The room seems quite full.

9:30 Arrive. People begin registering. The TUC is expecting around 100 people -- so I have prepared 100 flyers about LabourStart's new edition in Polish to be distributed to them. The list of conference participants shows people here from Amicus, Community, CWU, GFTU, GMB, NUJ, PCS, T&G, TSSA, UCU, Unison, and Usdaw -- with the largest delegations from Unison, the T&G and the GMB. The plenary session opens shortly with Owen Tudor, head of the TUC's European Union & International Relations Department speaking first, followed by Jack Dromey, the deputy general secretary of the T&G.

December 02, 2006

Lebanon 2006: A debacle for Israel?

A quarter century ago, I stood with an American friend at a peace rally in Tel-Aviv. We were both veterans of the anti-Vietnam war movement, and my friend commented how similar had been the trajectories of both the American movement and the Israeli in the wake of the 1982 Lebanon war. The difference, he pointed out, was that what took years to happen in the USA – the steady growth of that movement – happened in Israel over the course of several weeks.

The same observation may be applied to Israel's second Lebanon war which took place over the summer of 2006. This time, the parallel is not with Vietnam, but with the war in Iraq. In both cases, initial widespread support for the war (in the USA, the UK and Israel) was frittered away, to be replaced by disenchantment. But while this took several years to happen in the USA and UK, the process in Israel once again occurred over several weeks.

But before embracing the widely-held belief that the battles this summer in Lebanon and Gaza were unmitigated disasters for the Jewish state, let's try to remember what actually happened.

Israel was attacked on both fronts. The initiative was taken by a ruthless, aggressive enemy whose action followed upon the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the territories in question – Lebanon in 2000, Gaza in 2005. Those withdrawals were carried out with the full support of the Israeli left and peace movements, and were cheered on by the international community. Furthermore, the Hamas and Hizbollah attacks in the early summer of 2006 followed the Israeli elections which had brought to power one of the most pro-peace governments the country had ever known. The Likud had been soundly beaten in the Israeli elections. The new government was dominated by advocates of Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories.

Why Hamas and Hizbollah chose this moment to provoke Israel is an interesting question – and perhaps the real question is why their state sponsors, Syria and Iran, chose to do so. No doubt this is related to the roles they see themselves playing in the region, and not only in Palestine. In attacking Israel so brazenly, Iran and Syria have practically guaranteed themselves an invitation to be part of the “solution” in Iraq.

But there is also the question of what Israel should have done following the capturing and killing of its soldiers on its territory, and the subsequent Hizbollah rocket attacks on Israeli civilians in the north.

First of all, it should have been better prepared. The capture of Israeli soldiers within Israel is more than what Israelis tend to call a “fashla” (screw-up). It's more likely that the failure is systemic, but more on that in moment.

Israel was caught off guard and did what any country would do: it attempted to defend itself.

The consensus today is that the war was a disaster for Israel. But that consensus might just turn out to be wrong.

On the Lebanese front, Hizbollah was forced to withdraw its armed forces from the international border. A Lebanese army has been stationed there for the first time in decades. A vastly strengthened United Nations force is now in place. And the border has been quiet – completely quiet – since the war ended. How is any of this an Israeli defeat?

In Gaza, the war enormously weakened Hamas. In fact, the Islamic movement is now so weak that despite having clearly won the Palestinian elections earlier this year, it is now being forced to cede a considerable amount of power to its arch-rivals in Fatah. Had Israel really lost the battle in Gaza, this would not be happening.

There are some very clear parallels between what is happening in Israel now and what happened following the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The consensus at that time was that the Egyptian and Syrian armies had bloodied Israel, and that the myth of Israeli invulnerability dating back to the 1967 war had been buried.

Street demonstrations took place in Israel, the political careers of Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan were ended, everyone agreed that the war had been a debacle. And all this in spite of the fact that Israeli forces, even though taken by surprise, had smashed the Soviet-backed Syrians and Egyptians in three weeks of fierce fighting, crossing the Suez Canal for the first time.

But what happened next? In spite of what commentators and pundits were saying, the Egyptian elite (including President Sadat) realized that Israel could not be beaten by military force – even under the ideal conditions of a surprise attack.

This led directly to Sadat's historic visit to Jerusalem and to the Camp David accords. Syria, though refusing to talk peace, did agree to a series of disengagements and a quieting down of the border along the occupied Golan Heights. Terrorists no longer enter Israel from Syrian territory and no one expects Syria to ever again attempt the kind of invasion it launched in 1973.

In other words, the “debacle” of the Yom Kippur war turned out to be, at least in this sense, an Israeli triumph.

Can we say the same about the Lebanon war of 2006? It's too early to tell – anything can happen in Lebanese or Palestinian politics. But the good news is a greatly weakened Hamas and a much quieter northern border, with a commitment from the Lebanese government and the international community to keep it that way.

If Ehud Olmert and Amir Peretz lose their jobs over this, they will merely be following in the footsteps of Meir and Dayan. And perhaps they should lose their jobs.

After all, the war did reveal considerable weaknesses in the Israeli military. They should never have experienced the kidnapping and killing of armed soldiers on Israeli territory. The Israel Defense Forces proved largely incapable of preventing Hizbollah from launching its daily rocket barrages – perhaps because they were unable to focus Israel's firepower on Lebanese villages packed with civilians. (Had they done so, Hizbollah might have been crushed, but Israel too would have paid a heavy price.)

Whether this war, like its eerily-similar counterpart in 1973, leads to progress in the peace process remains an open question. The success of that process may depend less on what Israel and its Arab neighbors do, and more on what happens in Washington, as Bush and his successor re-discover the importance of continuing the ground-breaking work done by Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

December 01, 2006

OpenOffice: What are unions waiting for?

Every union in Britain can start saving money today by abandoning Microsoft Office and switching over to use OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org).

Nearly every union official I meet uses Microsoft Office, which costs around £375 per copy. This software suite includes such popular software as Word, Excel and PowerPoint. OpenOffice is the open source, free alternative and it costs nothing. It does everything Microsoft Office does, and is capable of reading – and producing – files in the various Microsoft formats.

When people send me Word documents, I open them using OpenOffice. When I need to send someone an Excel spreadsheet, I create it in OpenOffice.

In some ways, OpenOffice does even more than Microsoft Office. For example, when creating a document in OpenOffice, you can easily save it as a PDF file.

There are thousands of union officials in Britain who use computers that have been purchased for them by their unions. In almost every single case, the union is paying an unnecessary £375 (maybe slightly discounted) for software that has a free alternative. Why is this?

I think part of the reason is a lack of ICT skills in the trade union movement and an over-reliance on outside experts who themselves have been taught a very narrow range of skills. It used to be said that no one ever lost their jobs by recommending that a company buy its computers from IBM. The same is now true of Microsoft. The experts we rely upon consider it risky to propose to unions that they use OpenOffice (if they've even heard of it).

In fact, OpenOffice is hugely popular. There have been over 60 million downloads of the software, and it is increasingly being adopted by local and national governments as a cost-saving measure. The cities of Birmingham and Bristol, for example, have embraced it. The latter estimated that moving over to use OpenOffice would save over £1.4 million over a five-year period.

At the international training centre of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in Turin, Italy, trade unionists from around the world are trained to use OpenOffice and bring copies home on CDs to distribute throughout their unions.

What are Britain's unions waiting for?